With some anxiety, I tackled the front lamination. I was so concerned about the way the back had split that I cut apart the book-matched front face ...

Never mind. Let’s get on with the easy stuff. The neck!

By now, I had made two new moulds for back and front with 4 layers of 3mm MDF: i.e. an arch of around 12mm rather than 15mm as previously. And with g...

@tv101 I’m making this up as I go along. It just seemed like a simple way to persuade the joined veneers not to split along my dodgy glue line. As ...

Turns out some of you have short attention spans and don’t like all this talk of veneers. So, just for you, here’s some video of a vacuum pump.

Hmmm... let’s see... Nope. Well, that’s a little disappointing!

@rocknroller912 The adventure with the cutaway side suggests that the next stage in trying to force sawn veneer into a compound curve, without splitti...

@tv101 We used a two-pack urea resin. I doubt we’d have had time to correct my foolish error otherwise. And yes, left it overnight in the bag.

Next day, the other side was a doddle by comparison.

I decided to try and simplify things by bending and gluing the sides, which only require bending the lamination in one plane - not two. We chose the...

Before I continue with this enthralling build, I’ll just clarify that veneer softener is normally used to flatten veneer that is warping and curling. ...

OFFS! Turns out there’s something called Veneer Softener! Who knew! Everybody but me, apparently.

I’m still accumulating little bits of advice from across the internet. Here’s one from Airpress: “When a knife cut veneer (0.6mm) gets wet with glue...

Yup! A volume knob! I can’t resist it — is full sook 11?

@tv101 I reckon the critical factor will be how airtight the bag is. If it doesn’t lose much air in 5 mins then (slowly increasing) pressure is mai...

We’re trying to design assembly techniques that emulate methods Gibson pioneered in the 40s, but without building a factory full of heavy engineering....

@robin I used Titebond for speed because we were only running tests, but I reckon the combination of Titebond AND spray AND thin (and a little warped)...

Conclusion? I can’t afford the time or the wood to do a full set of controlled experiments. There are too many variables: Mould depth The curve...

And so I returned with a new mould made with 6 layers of 2mm MDF rather than 5 layers of 3mm MDF - so approx 12mm deep rather than 15mm. We were run...

Both pressings were aborted. I now had two slightly bent veneers with cracks. To continue the testing, we took the two cracked veneers and put a leaf ...